Fargo as a Fluid App

I thought it would be cool to have Fargo as a separate Fluid App. For those who don't know, Fluid let's you make a web app into what feels like a regular desktop app (for Mac OS X only). For me at least, this will make it easier to find Fargo among my many open windows and browser tabs -- now it's got it's own icon in my Dock and it's own spot in the Cmd-Tab switcher. It makes Fargo feel like the first-class Mac App that it is.

Here my switcher now -- there's our beloved dino!
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If you want to set this up too, know that I had to jump through a few hoops to get it to work. The difficulty appeared to be a by-product of Fargo needing to get my authorization to connect to my Dropbox account (in technical terms, OAuth is a pain in the ass). The workaround was to get this authorization before creating the Fluid App.

  1. Open Safari
  2. Go to http://fargo.io to launch Fargo
  3. Follow the prompts to authorize Fargo to connect to your Dropbox account
  4. Close Safari (optional)
  5. Create your Fargo Fluid App (follow the instructions on http://fluidapp.com/)
  6. Launch your new Fargo Fluid App

Why did that work?!

I'm using a free version of Fluid (for now -- still kicking the tires). The free version doesn't have separate cookie storage -- it shares it with Safari (Fluid is built on Apple's WebKit, like Safari). So, by setting everything up in Safari first, Fluid was able to piggyback on that setup when it created the Fargo app. Neat trick -- but not a long term solution. For example, I want to pay for the full version of Fluid (to support the developer), but I suspect this trick won't work in the full version.